RateItAll: The Opinion Network

Jimmy the Joke started off on the wrong foot. First he tried to abolish all formality and pageantry in the Presidency. Remember he prohibited playing "Hail to the Chief" for a couple years. Then when it was slipping out of his grasp and everyone thought he was a total nimrod, he started adding it back in. Too late!

Prevailing wisdom at the time was that an incumbent president was difficult to defeat unless disaster set in. Let's examine Jimmy. We had inflation at 10%, interest rates at 20%, one foreign policy disaster after another, and finally the military disaster in the desert of the attempted Iran rescue mission. It is amazing he won as many states as he did.

Not even sure why this one is on the list. Was anyone surprised that Carter lost? He and the Democrat Congress gave us double digit inflation, double digit interest rates, high unemployment, high energy costs, the near death of small business, the lowest housing starts since before World War 2, and humiliation on the world stage. A "surprise" that he lost in a landslide?

Carter was one of the best men, worst presidents of recent memory. A lack-lustre campaign could not overcome a poor presidency's record.

Interestingly, his re-election campaign comes off particularly poorly in comparison to his first campaign in 1976. In '76 he and his staff ran a crisp, intelligent campaign under a guise of folksy southern charm. In '80 they campaigned like a bunch of rubes.

Carter was going to lose in 1980, it was nearly inevitable. Indeed, it would have taken a miracle to save him, or the complete collapse of the Reagan campaign. Carter lost by a landslide even with the Republican base split between Ronald Reagan and John Anderson, a liberal Republican running as an independent. That just demonstrated the lack of support there was out there for Carter's candidacy. Reagan ran a smart, positive campaign that exploited the Democrat’s vulnerabilities, while putting forward an alternate agenda. Inflation, high interest rates, high taxes, high energy prices, low economic growth, and poorly calculated foreign policy decisions took their toll on Carter's presidency. Iran Contra was what really did him in with the American people. The Carter administration's ineffectiveness in dealing with the revolutionary government hurt. Keep in mind that Reagan’s agenda wasn’t as revolutionary as it might have seemed both on foreign and domestic policy. For instance, for all the claims that he used supply side economics to restart the economy during the 1980’s, plenty of Keynesian economics was used to get the economy going. This came in the form of higher military spending and other government initiatives. Plus many of the monetary reforms that were put in place by Paul Volker, chairman of the Federal Reserve, began impacting the economy only by 1984. Reagan lucked out that he was up for re-election that year and that the economy was on the upswing by then. These policies lead to higher deficit spending, but keep in mind that Reagan’s budgets were never nearly as high as George W. Bush’s are in comparison to total GDP. The deficit’s that we have today trouble me more than the ones that Reagan had. As for Carter, he was a good man, but he didn't have the strength of character required for the Presidency. He just wasn't worldly enough for the job; that became obvious to the American public rather quickly. Carter went in there thinking that he could change the world and how it operates. In other words, he was far too much an idealist. You can't run Washington like you run a peanut farm or a small church. If you start micromanaging, you'll lose sight of the broader picture. That in the final analysis was Carter’s greatest fault on the job.

How is this surprising at all? After the disaster Carter created in only 4 years (creation of the corrupt Dept of Education, weak foreign policies, hiring of several super liberal judges, etc.) it was more of a relief to get rid of him.

If people were following the polls the size of the landslide was quite surprising but considering the condition of the nation and the pathetic leadership in the White House at the time not surprising at all.

jimmy carter was completely out of his league as president. the only way that he was going to win was if the voters thought reagan was unfit to be president instead of them actually having confidence in carter's leadership. he won in 76 mainly because of watergate as americans needed someone they could trust in the white house after the nixon and agnew scandals. by 1980 after carter had butchered his presidency the american people were looking for competence, a quality that president carter was most surely lacking.